R

Since Grace has made a few posts recently about the misconceptions people have of what is prototypically Canadian (see her last post + anything about Maple Syrup), it seems fitting to make a post that shows that the opposite is also true.

Tonight four of us were eating dinner before our night lecture when the shows Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm came up. Berton and I, being the only North Americans present (Mathieu is Swiss and Gus is Brazilian), were the only ones who knew what these two shows were and so our enthusiasm was quite evident I think. When we tried to describe Curb Your Enthusiasm, the obvious starting point was to say that it is based on the personality and life of Larry David "the guy who co-wrote Seinfeld".

Unfortunately, neither Mathieu nor Gus had ever seen Seinfeld, so the comparison was completely missed. To Berton and I, this was totally shocking. Seinfeld was in many ways a generation defining show and, like the Simpsons, has even been responsible for the introduction of now common phrases into North American speech.

On another note, I promised I would post some photos of my first venture into stone carving. This is the second assignment and it's currently in progress. I was hoping to finish it yesterday but we couldn't carve due to a big assembly of ambassadors who had a meeting scheduled at the school. Since our carving creates a lot sharp and repetitive banging sounds for hours on end, the school administration asked if we could postpone our class. Anyway, the assignment is to carve a capital R as this contains all the essential shapes that one needs to carve the rest of the letters. It works out well for me since I get a nice little initial out of the deal.

On the bike-ride home after our lecture in Delft, the Buitenhoff (parliament building) was nicely illuminated so I took a photo of it. See for yourself: